Congress has launched an inquiry into the EPA’s use of drones to monitor the livestock activities of farmers in Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri.

In the latest escalation of the government’s all out assault on freedom and liberty in America farmers have become the latest target Uncle Sam’s multibillion dollar spy-machine.

The EPA is now using the same drones the military uses to track and assassinate people overseas to spy on the livestock activities of farmers throughout the Section 7 area of the midwest United States which includes Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers is demanding answers about privacy and other concerns from EPA Director Lisa Jackson who defends the practice as cost-effective.

American citizens should not only be demanding answers but should also be demanding an immediate stop to the use of drones to spy on Americans far outside of the realm of protecting us us from terrorists which was the deception used to trick us into accepting their use in the first place.

Instead, we see the drones being armed with lethal and less than lethal weapons as the law-abiding U.S. citizens going about their daily activities becomes the drones new targets.

Farmers are now being spied on by EPA drones, but where does it stop?

In terms of cost effectiveness, you could eliminate 2/3rds of the police and other enforcement officers across the nation and use that money to assign a drone to every man, woman and child in America.

Will zoning enforcement officers now start using drones to monitor construction workers as they build houses? Will spy drones be used to send you a ticket for spilling a few drops of gas when fueling your car? Will spy drones soon track and follow every single person as they leave their house and drive to work? Will pedestrians being ticketed for J-Walking? Will we start getting tasered and ticketed because a piece of paper flies out of our window or falls out of our shopping bags? Will we start getting tickets for running stop signs every time we don’t come to a complete stop and wait a full three seconds before proceeding? Traffic tickets for accidentally go a couple of miles over the speed limit? Making a lane change when no one else is around before signalling for 100 feet in advance?

EPA Using Spy Drones to Fly Over Midwestern Farms

What is the EPA doing with spy planes? And why are they flying them over farmland in the midwest?

A bipartisan group of Capitol Hill lawmakers is pressing EPA Director Lisa Jackson to answer questions about privacy issues and other concerns after the agency used aerial surveillance to monitor livestock operations over their home state of Nebraska.

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The letter asks nearly two-dozen questions including why the inspections are being conducted, how many flights have occurred and whether they have resulted in any enforcement activities.

“Nebraskans are rightfully skeptical of an agency which continues to unilaterally insert itself into the affairs of rural America,” Smith added.

The Environmental Protection Agency uses aerial surveillance across a swath of the Midwest know as Section 7 – which includes Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and Missouri — and has defended the practice as cost-efficient.

Cost isn’t the issue, as the EPA surely knows. What they’re doing using spy planes over the US, for what purpose, and what are they doing with the information they’re gathering — that’s the issue.

While I am an environment activist myself I will be the first one to stand up and say whoever authorized this needs to be flat-out tar and feathered because this is wrong for so reasons.

First of all, Uncle Sam is violating the trust of the American people who have consented in silence to the use of these spy drones in U.S. skies to keep them safe from terrorist attacks.

Clearly this is a blatant invasion of privacy and while US law allows the government to monitor individuals without warrant in public places the law needs to be clarified to stipulate at least having probable cause to do so.

We now live in a day an age where technology literally allows the government track everyone’ activities everywhere they go.

With the advent of silent miniaturized bug sized drones they can spy on you from outside your house through your windows, which is considered in public view and subject to monitoring without a warrant.

In regards to the farmer’s being spied on what enrages me most are the EPA’s ill motives behind such monitoring.

There are many corporations that continue to destroy our environment and poison the air, water, and food supply that the EPA should be monitoring but instead they choose to attack and monitor the livestock activities of small rural farmers.

Make no mistake, they are attacking these farmers to protect the interests behind America’s industrial food system that continues to manufacture junk foods loaded with poisons that 30 years ago wouldn’t even be recognized as food.

How many of these farmers are going to want to continue their professions knowing that they will have these government drones watching them for no reason at all?

Data collected from these drones will undoubtedly be feed to the Department of Homeland Security and fed to computer algorithms that will flag potential ‘terrorist’ activity.

Who would want to put themselves in such a situation when instead they can work a different job that doesn’t have such risks?

Is the EPA doing this to scare farmers out of the business?

Farming is a dying industry own its own.

Organic fresh foods are constantly being attacked by government regulators and even without that pressure the genetically modified crops from the likes of Monsanto grow faster with bigger yields further threatening the America farmer.

At the same time these industrialized crops that have been modified to produce their own pesticides which makes its way in to our bodies and our water supplies.

Even livestock is being replaced with cloned and genetically modified versions.

Even worse is the EPA is focusing their time and energy on these farmers while corporations pump and dump toxic chemicals in our water supplies, on our land and into our air.

We continually see major bodies of waters such as the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes becoming over polluted mercury and other toxins.

The list goes on and on while we see the EPA turning a blind eye to the widespread toxification of America by these industrial size mega-corporations and instead devote their time and energy to cracking down little guys like these farmers.

Our founding fathers warned repeatedly that only an overbearing government seeking to push totalitarian control would attempt to force the fallacy that people need to forfeit liberty in the name of security.

To prevent any such attempt the inalienable rights of all humankind were forever scribed into the U.S. constitution. forever be treated as nothing more than fabricated falsehood and to prevent our government from every making such attempts

In the wake of 9/11 we have seen this falsehood used time and time again to deceive the people into forfeiting their civil liberties as the concrete foundation of our constitution is slowly eroded into sand and our rights become nothing more than dust in the wind.

We have seen such forfeitures of our liberties turn into a vast array of programs under which the government has seized nearly unchecked power to perform search and seizure of persons and their property without warrants or judicial oversight in direct violation of the fourth amendment of the U.S constitution .

The list of such programs such nefarious programs include – but are not limited to warrantless wiretapping, widespread monitoring of Muslims, nationwide monitoring of the Occupy movement, the planting GPS trackers on the vehicles of environmental and anti-war activists.

Congress is currently pushing through cybersecurity legislation to track every person’s every digital communication.

The Department of homeland security monitors online activities on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter and datamines the words people use to flag them as terrorist suspects.

This escalation of government invasion of citizens privacy is now being augmented with use of computer controlled airplanes equipped with high-tech spying equipment and weapons of both the lethal and less than lethal.

On the ground tens of thousands of sensors are being deployed nationwide which will feed live data of people’s movement on the ground to big brother’s surveillance dragnet.

Still, many have been convinced by the multitude of government stenographers in the corporate news media that these are all necessary means to protect us safe from those who are secretly planning to attack us.

In reality it is nothing more than a campaign of deception being used to morph American into massive micro-managed police state in which no citizens will be safe from government harassment.
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DCFusor, I read that the .338 Lapua shoots flatter, according to Chris Kyle, the American sniper (with more verified kills than anyone else) who liked that gun the best. He used a few different ones (his book is titled something like American Sniper) and is pretty new. He picked the .338 near the end of his career there in Iraq.

Not really. The .338 lapua was developed to create a lighter gun (easier to stalk with) but still with a lot of momentum (barrier penetration), since in Bosnia, a .50 was too heavy to stalk with, but the opposing side tended to be well barricaded. It's a heavy bullet round - better than .308 at range (takes longer to go subsonic) but not that flat.
Neither is the .50 - it's just that flat or not, it's still a heck of a lot of energy even going slow. And unlike the rest, it can shoot the Raufoss round (exploding armor piercing incendiary) - a pretty wicked projectile.

Look up CheyTac .408 for the ultimate in man-carried flat and range.

When a round goes subsonic, it's not that it doesn't still have some energy, it's that the buffeting during the transition tends to make it diverge from the original trajectory. So a .308 can kill at over a mile - but good luck getting one to go where aimed, since it will go subsonic first (and be falling almost straight down by the time it gets there too).

I sense you really want to own a .338 - go for it! But after more experience, you might want to look at other things - just sayin. They shine particularly in urban sniping with opponents behind the usual not-thick but brick walls and so on.

Right now, I'm having some fun with the other extreme - a Howa in .204 ruger, with 4200 fps muzzle velocity. So flat that if zeroed at 200 yds, it's only .6" high at 100...
And even those tiny bullets easily pierce 3/8" thick hard steel - they expand explosively, but go through anyway - making a half inch hole that looks like a splash frozen in time. And put thousands of burnt-edge holes in a paper target a few feet behind the steel. Not for longer ranges - ballistic coeff is lousy, but for real life, not so shabby.

Most real marksmen don't care much about flat, since nothing is perfect; you have to range and compensate anyway. Distance to subsonic is much more important at long range, as well as what happens when it gets there (how much damage it can do).

Flat is a function of anything accelerating towards the earth's center at 32 ft/sec/sec, vs how long it takes to get there. So high average velocity is key. .300 win mag is considered one of the better ones for mid to long rang shooting (wins most competitions at 1k yards) but it's real hard on the shooter. For my own long range competition use, I'm moving to 6.5 mm, as with a fast twist, you can shoot very high BC bullets medium fast, and they buck wind well, while letting me go home without bruises. When shooting essentially straight up - flat is not the issue.

If you give permission, yeah. But what constitutes permission? Directly over? What angular cone? Assume the spread from a point in the earth center?. Would that make any difference at all to a drone armed with a missile with miles of range?

Of course, in US you have essentially zero air rights - government has taken them utterly from us already for commercial and military aviation. That fight was lost a long time ago, and where I live they flaunt it by coming over in fighters at tree top levels. When you complain - the claim they have a floor at 2500 feet. Defined how? I'm AT 2500 feet above sea level. You can send them pix and if you can see both the pilot's face and tail number, they get a free drink in the officer's club as punishment.

I agree there are legitimate uses for drones, and they could save some money too.
But the current legal infrastructure being set up is not needed for those legit uses, it's more like for uses similar to in Afghanistan - surveillance of any group that might be "enemy" and their destruction, not traffic safety or border monitoring.

This is kind of the ultimate slippery slope. Drones being cheap means that while what they could do with helicopters was fairly reasonable - they can't be everywhere all the time, too expensive - can now be done everywhere and everywhen with drones. Even then they cheat, hard. Helicopter surveys by fish and wildlife supposedly looking at the bear population were used to bust minor pot growers instead, with no bear numbers ever publicly reported. 4th amendment is dead meat.

Freedom isn't free. I'm sure there will be incidents of people shooting down drones, and then going to jail for it, just as there have been of people shooting at those a hole fighter jocks who kill your livestock by stampeding them. How do they know who it was? They all have cameras already...disk space being cheap and all...

Note: They're not harassing Tyson or any other mega-farms. This is an assault against the small farms by the mega-farms, who use the government to destroy competition.

__________________ "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

This is the heart of crony capitialism, as you said "use the government to destroy competition"

...you see, that is why I am against government powers of ANY kind in the economy - yes indeed things like "tax office hitman" are anybody's secret back in Poland - you can simply pay a bribe to a tax officer (well, you have to be connected first), who will go in and shut down your competition for any made-up reason, or at least harass them enough to slowe them down or stop from winning some important contract etc. They were as cheeky, as going after one of the richest Poles, with his teams of lawyers and connections. He has won, ultimately, with taxpayers paying the bill for the misuse of tax office powers, and negligence. But his company folded into "insignificant" category, in the meantime.

This is the kind of things, that I do love Chinese for - if they have caught you doing this kind of stuff, you'd be executed. That should be the case, for corrupted govt officers, they should have been penalized with death, as what they do is a treason; of their country, its citizens, and the very laws they are sworn to protect.

These modified crops are thought by many to be the root cause of the demise of 30 to 40% of the the honeybee population in North America each year. Can you imagine the uproar if cattle farmers lost 30% of their livestock each year to some vague malady? Yet, we hear little about the plight of the honeybees.

The FTC do not call list ain't perfect, but it cuts them down a heck of a lot. The rest get hung up on more or less instantly. Real humans - I troll them along, get their names, then remind them I'm on the don't call list and they're doing a crime.

Waste their time, get a click when you say that. Works on hot-dog cold-calling stock jockeys too, and it's kinda fun how I jerk them around. Then tell them I do this from 5 am to 7 pm every day, and am a pro trader with a hell of a lot more experience than them. Hell, if they call me more than once, I never fail to point out I went short what they wanted to start an account going long and made a ton (more often than not, true). Stupid, yeah. Fun - you bet.

Jury is out on the bees, but unlikely it's the GM crops at this point...I have a friend who's a beekeeper, lots of hives, he's doing fine (with a lot of that around here) - sanitation and attention to his stuff. Anything working with life - you gotta pay attention, it's not robots and automatic. You work with it, not dominate. Nature will shoot back if you force things.

Jury is out on the bees, but unlikely it's the GM crops at this point...I have a friend who's a beekeeper, lots of hives, he's doing fine (with a lot of that around here) - sanitation and attention to his stuff. Anything working with life - you gotta pay attention, it's not robots and automatic. You work with it, not dominate. Nature will shoot back if you force things.

I'm a beekeeper as well, and I haven't yet lost a hive, either. Doesn't mean it's not occurring. Current research does (despite Bayer's propaganda) show a strong correlation between the modified crops and Colony Collapse Disorder.

Do you guys keep the bees just for the honey, or are you able to incorporate their polination proclivity into the rest of your gardening?

As for the drones, I always say anything we do over there eventually gets done over here, and these drones are another miserable example. There has already been fuzz around here getting them for their departments, supposedly for surveillance and less-lethal weapon deployment. "Oh, only watching our every move...and the bullets are rubber, well that's just dandy then."

The drones are trying to stop illegal dumping of cow waste into public drinking water. They are not the same drones used in Pakistan - they have no weapons attatched. They are no different that the cameras photographing people running stoplights, for example; however, stopping illegal poisoning of public drinking water is a bit more serious than running a red light.